Be the Bird

by Neera Kashyap

Our consultant ornithologist: short, muscular, sunbaked. In the front seat of the Sumo, head straight, his eyes scanned the horizon a hundred and eighty degrees with slow assurance. Through the windscreen his eyes sucked in the sky, its birds, its blueness -- his Olympus 8 X 40 DPS 1 field glasses, quick on the draw. On the ground he moved lithe and quick like a tiger, using stealth and cover to aid his sightings. On an ascending jungle trail, the edge of a mountain canyon or the sluggish swamp of a degraded nullah, he moved quietly, always quietly, whispering a sighting, indicating the location, confirming the species, then withdrawing to leave the field open to the noise of our suppressed excitement. Then he would give quick details of the bird – its gender, its habits, it nesting patterns, its link with other life in this habitat, its call.

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He would be especially quiet when, after a disappointing forest trudge, we stumbled upon a ‘mixed hunting party’ in a sudden clearing: a variety of birds everywhere – on the ground, among the bushes, on the branches of an oak, in the high canopy of a silver birch: tits, minivets, nuthatches, bush chats, woodpeckers. As these winged bands moved swiftly in the shimmering sun, he would consult his guidebook to make sure he had identified the tiny ones correctly. Then relaxed, he would point to the harmonics of the whole, like an orchestra: babblers rummaging among fallen leaves for insects, disturbing a moth swooped upon by a drongo in mid-air; a barbet breaking its monotonous tuktuk call to search for a winged termite on a dead branch, stampeding winged insects resting on its bark, promptly snapped up by a vigilant flycatcher.

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Him: observer of this harmony, encouraging observation.  

He had spent a year alone in the core area of the Nagzira National Park, a green oasis of thick lush vegetation ringed by hills, functioning without electricity so as not to disturb the wildlife. Like the woodpecker, he had drummed out this territory and others to expand his knowledge and himself.

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‘See these holes in the bark,’ he said as we watched for an hour a Rufous-bellied woodpecker tattooing its way up a Himalayan blue pine. ‘It pounds and tears away at the bark to search for insects. It has a sticky tongue with a barbed end that darts out two inches beyond its beak so it can pull insects out even from deep crevices. It excavates cavities in dead trees and branches when it needs to build a nest. This means the most terrific effort – pounding at the wood with its skull and bill, defying gravity by pressing down its tail feathers, gripping the tree deeply with its claws. Its whole body shakes from the stress. It rests, but cocks its head about to sense predators. Once its brood is raised, it abandons the cavity and starts all over again.’ He broke off for us to listen to the woodpecker’s shrill rolling chrrrchrrrchrr.

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‘You may think this pounding and drumming is quite meaningless. Actually, it’s not. A woodpecker eats termites and bugs that could be harmful to the tree, especially the ones that live deep inside. Its drumming stimulates oxygen flow in the bark so that new insects breed which other birds come to eat. And most importantly, it creates nest cavities that are used by other birds and animals that cannot excavate cavities themselves: nuthatches, owls, kestrels, starlings, squirrels, flying squirrels … so many.’

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Him: aerator-excavator, sharing with us his knowledge and love of birds which we may not have known on our own.

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He could leave a famous wetland behind with its marshy expanses and din of honking, quacking, trumpeting water birds to explore a filthy nullah doubling up as a public toilet in a populous part of the city. ‘See this tangle of water hyacinth. It has arrested the water flow and created a water habitat for waders,’ he pointed out, oblivious to the stench that overpowered us. A mass of decayed vegetable matter, dung, sewage, garbage and silt served as a landing and resting pad for the waders. ‘Not many birds, but look at the variety: red wattled lapwing, ruff, common moorhen, white-browed wagtail, greater painted snipe. It’s maddening.’

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Herding us behind a thicket of prosopisjuliflora, he focused on a pair of snipe. They hid in their shallow nest on the ground, behind reeds and grass at the water’s edge, shy and retiring. After waiting patiently for twenty minutes, the less showy male left the nest, walked slowly to the resting pad and stood motionless, keeping its white-patch eye on him. He remained still and unmoving. Soon, it stretched its left wing and left leg simultaneously, rearranging its abdominal feathers. ‘This means he feels safe, relaxed,’ he whispered. It uttered a shrill trill. He responded with an equally shrill cop copcop. The bird did an about turn and disappeared into the grass and reed! ‘Even our slightest movement will disturb their rest, and mine was a call he recognized as false.’

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Then skywards to high-altitude Himalayan heights where the lammergeyer vulture soars amid plump white clouds and deep blueness. The edge of a cliff was flanked by tall escarpments on both sides. Small flowers in blazing colours peeped out of packed soil and stone. ‘It is a juvenile,’ he murmured. ‘It is carrying a bone in its talons. Watch.’ It rose from a patch of bare rock near the top edge of a cliff. ‘It chooses a cliff top, so it has least difficulty flying into the air. See how it manoeuvres its wings and tail to exploit every current and eddy to gain height.’ It spiralled upwards, stopped high above a flat rock and dropped the bone. The bone missed the rock and tumbled down the scarp. The bird swooped low to pick it up again, glided upwards in loose wide spirals like the coils of a spring, tilted its body to face upwind and soared up effortlessly. This time it dropped the bone on a large rock-slab. The bone did not break. ‘This bird breaks the bone to get at the nutritious marrow, though it is happy to eat the spikey splinters. It can take seven years of practice before bone breaking is mastered,’ he said.

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Through our binoculars we watched this bird pick up the bone once again, gliding till it soared, leisurely, effortlessly in an upward surge of graceful motion. One had to drop one’s field glasses, close one’s eyes and absorb in one’s being this speck of a bird merging into the blueness. Something stirred within and the heart soared to peace and freedom.

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I am the lammergeyer. I am the lammergeyer getting to the marrow. I am.